Angela Carella: New author finds redemption in her story

Updated 7:05 pm, Thursday, January 22, 2015

Jennifer Cipri had to learn to live with loss long before she was old enough to understand it.

Her father, Remo Cipri, was a tree cutter and self-taught sculptor and painter known around Stamford for the totem poles he carved in the yard of his West Side home.

For years a 28-foot totem pole depicting animals and fish stood in Cove Island Park, a gift of Remo Cipri.

But Jennifer hardly had the chance to know him. He died of cancer in 1981, when she was 2.

The family struggled after that. Jennifer's mother, Ethel Cipri, worked at Stamford Hospital. There was little money. In the 1980s crime plagued the neighborhood.

But on the West Side, an enclave of Italian-Americans for most of the last century, the old ways were still in place.

Jennifer's relatives owned Cipri's Pizza, then on Stillwater Avenue around the corner from her home. They were always there, working and watching out for her and her two sisters.

"I was raised by old-school aunts and uncles, by my great-aunts," Cipri said. "It was all about togetherness, family meals, companionship, loyalty. The kitchen table was the glue that held people together."

It extended beyond family. After Remo Cipri died, the late Anthony Pellicci, owner of Pellicci's Ristorante, "let us eat there every Sunday for free," Cipri said.

"The West Side was a blessed place to live," she said. "People were devoted to each other. It made you feel safe."

Then there were the stories -- about Italy, what was left behind, what drove people to America, what they faced when they arrived and how they survived.

"Because of the storytelling, the culture was never lost," Cipri said. "The stories are so vivid, I dream them sometimes."

Despite hardship, Ethel Cipri, who'd served in the Peace Corps in the 1960s, continued to volunteer. She taught English to new immigrants and catechism at Sacred Heart Church. She wrote poetry and, like her husband, loved art, volunteering as a docent at the Whitney Museum, once downtown.

"I didn't understand why she was volunteering when we were poor ourselves," Cipri said. "What she was saying was that no matter how hard your life might be, you are responsible to help others. If you are down in the dirt, you still have to look around and see if there is someone you can help."

Jennifer struggled, too. Classroom work did not come easy, and she bounced between high schools, landing in an alternative program at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church.

Not long after graduation her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Ethel Cipri died when Jennifer was 22. She had no parents, no home.

"I was really lost," Cipri said.

She lived with friends and relatives and took a job at the Ferguson Library. One day at work grief swept over her, and a deep sense of separation. A desire to see her mother again, to return home, overwhelmed her.

All she could think was: Write it down. And so her heart came out, handwritten on two pages of scrap paper.

"It was a love letter to my mother," Cipri said.

She wanted someone to read it. She brought it to her former English teacher at St. Andrew's. Mrs. Thanhauser always told Jennifer she was a good writer, despite her learning difficulties.

Then something magical happened. Thanhauser gave Jennifer's letter to her former guidance counselor, Marian Bauer, who sent it to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., one of the country's top schools, known for its rigorous academic standards and focus on the arts.

Cipri had never heard of Sarah Lawrence. But soon someone from the college invited her to take a class for free and, after that, to apply, with an offer of financial aid.

"I was so hurt by my mom's death, I was not applying to colleges. And a college like that? It didn't happen to people like me," Cipri said.

Yet she graduated Sarah Lawrence with a degree -- and something else.

The seeds of a story.

They came from the love letter to her mother, from what she knew about her father, from Stamford, from the West Side, from love, loss, loyalty, struggle, and a concept called prisca theologia -- that spiritual wisdom threads through all religions going back to ancient times.

The doctrine recognizes the spiritual behind physical form, is mystical rather than dogmatic, and offers a path to knowledge beyond thought and sensation.

"I learned about it from studying the House of Medici," the wealthy Italian family in Florence that centuries ago fostered the Italian Renaissance. "They were after pure divine knowledge, and gave people space to investigate that. Out of it came some of the greatest art of all time."

Think Michelangelo.

Drawing from that, her life, and the old West Side, Cipri wrote a novel, "The Book, the Key and the Crown," a mystery, fantasy and page-turner published in November.

It is the story of a poverty-hardened 16-year-old, Stori Putzarella, whose mother is dying and father has gone missing. Stori tries to take care of her mother and sister, and search for her father, fighting a deepening web of evil characters, real and metaphysical.

Readers may recognize Stamford as the city of Redemption, where all the old houses are being raised, the mayor's goal is to be "a booming metropolis," and the motto is Future Forward Free from the Past.

Readers may recognize the old West Side as The Valley, a section of Redemption where the old ways are passed down, spoken, on "a thread as thin as spider's silk that has never been broken."

Stori admonishes a character for being "facce due," or two-faced. "An insult in English is one thing. But an insult in Italian is the ultimate disrespect," Stori explains.

Stori's pursuit of the truth of her father's disappearance leads her to Redemption's dirty secret.

"I took Stamford as it is today but put it in the most vulnerable place -- very corrupt people at the helm and sinister people behind the scenes, trying to corrupt the citizens," said Cipri, 35. "In The Valley the older generation is fading. The younger ones love them but they don't realize what is being passed on to them, or that they are at peril if they don't listen."

She is working on a sequel.

"Writing this has changed my life," she said. "I have so much faith that good things will come of it."

Cipri will discuss her book at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Ferguson Library's Weed branch, 1143 Hope St., Stamford.